Russia gave Ukrainian fighters who remained in Mariupol until noon on Sunday to lay down their arms. If the ultimatum was disregarded, Moscow threatened them with death. “The only chance to save their lives is to voluntarily lay down their arms and surrender,” the Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday. After the ultimatum expired on Sunday afternoon, the Ukrainian militants were apparently still at the Mariupol steelworks.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk appealed to Russia to open escape corridors for civilians from Mariupol. A “humanitarian corridor” must be created especially for women and children, she wrote on the Telegram messaging service.
Mariupol has been under siege since the first days after the Russian invasion on 24 February. Meanwhile, the city in the southeast, which once had more than 400,000 inhabitants, has been largely destroyed and the humanitarian situation is catastrophic. According to the World Food Program, more than 100,000 civilians in the city are at risk of starvation.
Zelenskyj described the situation in Mariupol in a video message as “inhumane”. Russia is “deliberately trying to destroy everyone there”. Zelenskyy appealed to the West to provide his country with “all necessary heavy weapons immediately”.
Ukraine accuses Russia of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities. Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Federov stressed that his country is currently collecting all evidence of Russian atrocities. “We will hand everything over to The Hague,” he said, referring to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is already investigating alleged war crimes in Ukraine. “There will be no impunity.”
Since the withdrawal of Russian armed forces from the Kiev metropolitan area, fighting has increasingly shifted to southern and eastern Ukraine. Experts assume that Russia wants to announce victory in Ukrainian Donbass by the symbolically hugely important 9 May. Amid fears of a major Russian offensive in the Donbass regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, Ukrainian authorities have been urging residents there to flee to the west for days.
Planned escape routes remained closed on Sunday. Vereshchuk explained that it was not possible to reach an agreement with the Russian “occupiers” on a ceasefire for the region. According to Ukrainian sources, more than 50 people were killed in a deadly attack on Ukrainian refugees at the Kramatorsk train station in early April.
After two weeks of relative calm, the Russian army again intensified its air strikes in the Kiev region. On Sunday night, the Russian army said it had attacked an munitions factory in Brovary, near Kiev, and destroyed it with “high-precision aerial missiles”. It was the third such attack in the Kiev area since Friday.
While Zelenskyj again warned against Russian use of chemical or nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Russia threatened the US with “unprecedented consequences” if the country supplied Ukraine with its “sensitive” weapons systems. On Saturday, the Russian Defense Ministry reported the shooting down of a Ukrainian cargo plane near Odessa, allegedly carrying Western weapons.